Albany – NY Gov Restores Roll Calls for Private Schools And Yeshivas

Albany – New York Gov. David Paterson is restoring a requirement for religious and independent schools across the state to track student attendance throughout the day, a move that Catholic schools think is an opening to restore $44 million in critical funding.

Paterson had cut a requirement called the “comprehensive attendance policy,” a safety measure for monitoring students’ whereabouts, to save millions in the budget. He’s restored the requirement, but not the funding.

The state Education Department developed a formula to determine the cost for nonpublic schools to meet the requirements to collect and report the data back to the state.

Paterson dropped his plans to cut the program last week in his 30-day amendments to the executive budget proposal, but it’s still unclear how it would be funded.

“Based on input on the nonpublic schools, a decision was made to restore the attendance taking requirement that had been eliminated in the executive budget; however, in light of the state’s fiscal crisis, funding was not restored,” said Jeffrey Gordon, a spokesman for the Division of the Budget.

Still, private schools view this as a step toward restoring dollars to the program.

“We applaud the administration for their expressed willingness to negotiate a restoration of funds to the program,” said James Cultrara, director for education of the Catholic Conference.

The Catholic Advocacy Network has sent 31,000 e-mails to the governor protesting the cut.

The program covers about 500,000 students in private schools. The affected students attend Catholic schools, yeshivas, independent schools and other religious schools such as Christian academies.

Paterson has said the schools will still get more than $80 million a year in aid for other services, including once-daily attendance taking and reporting. The state reimbursed nonpublic schools nearly $135 million last year.